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5 Money Lessons for Toddlers

Both my husband and I came from families who didn’t involve us in “money matters”.

Growing up, we just learned our money management skills from work, workshops, books and sad to say most from mistakes and “charge to experience” life circumstances.

That’s why one of our desires is to raise our son, who will someday be the provider of his family (a father), to be a moneywise kid.

We believe it is our responsibility as parents to teach our children their needed “life skills” and financial management is one of these..

At this age, some people might say that maybe its too early. Toddlers have young creative minds but financial literacy can be taught as early as now by giving the age appropriate approach. I will be sharing you some ways we taught (and still in the process..) our son Zee about money that is suitable for his age:

1. God is the owner of everything we have – we made an introduction by constantly telling him everyday that the food on our plate, our work, small business and everything that he can see with his eyes are from God and owned by God.

Lesson :We are just stewards and God is the owner of them all (introduction to Tithes & Offering)

2. Delayed Gratification – Inays and Daddies, I know you can relate to that “super pact face” convincing you to buy something for him or her.

But.. as intentional parents, we also need to help our children excercise “patience”. How? Buy letting them “wait”.

Before we go to the mall, we orient Zee on just what we are going to buy (like in the groceries) and we will let him play inside the toy store but we will not buy anything and that’s it!

Hindi na sya magpupumilit na bilhan sya. Because it is not yet the time for him to get something. We are thankful this strategy works!

Moms and Dads, we also avoid the words “We do not have money” or “Wala tayong pera”.

We’ve learned from the Book the Heart of Parenting that we, parents should model “Provision Mindset instead of Poverty Mindset” to our children.

Lesson : Learn to wait. We can’t have everything we want on the spot. A baby step to “saving introduction”.

3. Pretend Play –we love pretend play, even with no props and no preparation play, like for example while we are working from home Zee will pretend to be a service crew or a chef, and we will give him an imaginary money as payment and he will give us change (sometimes beans, tickets from Amusement parks or even a piece of paper. haha!)

You can also enroll your kids to activities or workshops that introduce them to hard work and glimpse of how adults work e.g, kiddie crew workshops etc.

Lesson :Value for money and hard work. Baby step to “hard work and payment for things”

4. Involvement in Real Life – dahil wala kaming yaya nor helper, we always bring Zee with us during client meetings, material sourcing and regular business tasks – and one of these is “bank transactions”. Whenever we are inside the bank I explain to him what we’re going to do.

I’ve noticed many people are allergic to bank transactions.

Natatandaan ko pa 16 years old ako noon una akong nagdeposit and clue less talaga ako at kinakabahan na magkamali ng deposit so that’s why we want to expose our son to Basic Banking. So he’ll be comfortable and not be intimidated of the place.

Lesson :Be comfortable to financial institutions and familiarize with real life financial transactions

5. Scheduled Treats and Rewards –we set a once a week “Ice Cream Day”! Usually on a Wednesday. With this, our son will not ask us everyday to get him an ice cream because he knows that there’s a specific day assigned for it!

Lesson:There’s time for everything. Living within a budget doesn’t mean a deprived life and there’s joy in little things :)

But of course mommies, as they say “values are caught not taught”. Being a good example of how to give, save, spend and invest to our children is the most effective way to teach them values on money.

Whenever we don’t have and the kids want to ask for some, we always used to say, “okay, but not today.” Or let’s pray for it. It’s funny though, cause kids are smart and they eventually figured out there’s no money, haha! So sometimes they say, do we have enough money for this mom? But those are the two younger kids. I need to sit them down soon and start talking to them about it.

OMG this hit the spot! We practice almost all of the tips you mentioned above, particularly delaying gratification and involving Yuri in real life – we actually take him to mall duty (I’m a real estate broker) and let him watch us work so he’ll appreciate the value of money. Cheers to raising financially wise kids!

Agree. It’s our responsibility to teach them money matters. We bought a monopoly board game for my 9yr old son as a start of teaching him money handling. It’s our bonding activity that teaches him how to spend and invest his money.